Earlier this year we learned from Microsoft that Paint, the very popular image editing program that has been part of Windows for more than 35 years, would be deprecated in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. The company stated their plan was to move the current version of Paint to the Microsoft Store and freeze its development. Paint 3D, which was added to Windows 10 as part of the Creators Update this past March, provides all of Paint’s functionality in addition to 3D capabilities and is the heir apparent to Paint itself in Windows.
The Fall Creators Update, which was released in October, still contains Paint as part of the operating system for the moment.
However, as Rich Woods noted over on NeoWin noted last night, the version of Paint that is in the current Redstone 4 (RS4) development branch build, 17063, has a new product alert in the Paint UI about this deprecation.
If you open Paint in RS4 Build 17063 and look on the far right side of the ribbon toolbar you will see a button with an i in a blue circle that you can select. It opens a dialog box that tells you about the status of Paint and its future move to the Store.
Although not confirmed by Microsoft in their deprecated features support article, it appears the RS4 feature update to Windows 10 will make this change permanent.
If you are worried that Paint 3D might not be able to handle the functionality of Paint itself, I recommend you check out something I wrote when this news came out which shows you can do all of that and more.
The future of image editing is quite safe on Windows 10 moving forward.
